Broke my rule of swapping at 5 years or 70,000 miles......... car now 5 and 1/2 and 77,000 miles. Just completed a 140 mile round trip visiting family. 95% motorway door to door. About 50 miles in when on round about between the M62 (or M60 these days???) and M66 it stalled when I set off from red light. At 1st thought I'd accidently put it 3rd instead of 1st but then heard a ping and saw a yellow 'powertrain' light on dash (round cog with ! in centre). Restarted and sort kangarooed a few yards and died again. Restarted again drove OK but light came back on. Off MWay on last bit of journey did struggle/miss abit when accelerating. Parked up at destination and called AA. Nice AA man quickly arrived and confirmed I hadn't put petrol in, water and oil are fine. Plugged his laptop in and not a sausage recorded in fault memory. I did fill up from local Jet garage night before but managed 50 miles before any problems. He said poss fuel filter needs replacing and that its usually 'sticky' EGR valves that plague these engines. Car has full Ford history so assuming filter is OK? Journey back home was fine, car ran fine but powertrain lamp did reappear when I slowed down at the M66/M62 junction. Stopped at nearby services, had a pi$$ and when I resumed journey light had disappeared and didn't reappear again. Looking on this site the powertrain lamp is either a harbinger of impending EGR failure or glowplugs/glowplug relay problems. One last piece of info that may be related, the previous few weeks it has sometimes puffed out grey smoke when starting in morning from cold, looks and smells like diesel not oil, injector weeping over night or sticky EGR issue??? Anyone had similar symptoms, will it hold out long enough whilst I swap car. Is there still a 3 month wait on factory orders?

I was picked off on a dual carriage way next to a Mway junction by the Gestapo in a van in a layby. Wasn't over by too much and eventually (in wifes company motor so took ages for paperwork to get to me) got offered the 're-education' course which I of course took. It was actually quite entertaining, there was a double act running it and one of the guys could make a living as a stand up comedian. There was a husband and wife couple at mine that had both been caught by the M62 roadwork's that were on-going at the time and he was merciless with them..... I was in the afternoon class of about 50, + 50 in the morning, every day, all across the country. They have to offer re-education otherwise the entire country will soon be banned from driving for going 3mph over the limit. The main push was if you don't slow down you are going to kill a child, they then show a film of masses of uncontrolled school children running across the road outside a school into the path of a poor unfortunate driver. They also claimed that their good work was responsible for the drop in road deaths. I think the drop is more likely due to modern cars that you can crash at 50mph and walk away (try that in an old mini or MK1 Fester) and mainly due to the fact that no testosterone fuelled under 25 year old males are on the road due to not being able to afford any insurance.

Longish m-way runs for work was giving 57/58 on trip computer so prob 55/56 in reality. Dropped a bit now I'm working for home for a few weeks and pottering about. Car desperately needs an higher fifth or even a extra 6th gear, then I'm sure it would make an easy 60+ .

In the not so distance future most cars will have computer controlled dual clutch automatic gearboxes so there will be no clutch pedal to confuse those with no understanding of how a car works. This will be because dual clutch autos will allow the designers control everything when trying to cut down CO2 emission. What's the point of having computerised engines, stop start systems and radar controlled brakes when drivers choose the wrong gears at the wrong times? Also as Paull001 testifies, people spend time stuck in congestion and can't/won't change in and out of gear all day.

I'll be the one that writes what everyone else is thinking about Paul001 and CookieM's driving technique..... Don't hold the clutch in if you are stationary. You'll knacker the thrust bearing or wear out the fiction plate or both.

Heavens Hellshore, they took 3 attempts to put a tyre on the right way around. Continental tyres, even have "OUTSIDE" written the tyre walls. End of bell shaped muppets. Ford, nice cars shame about the stealers. (Rotherham site are the tyre experts, Dewsbury service current car and apart from washing it with a filthy gritty sponge... are reasonably OK)

With the size and weight of modern cars its amazing that they match the go and mpg of previous generations. The latest fester prob weighs twice the 70s original. The recent small capacity petrol turbos (and often minus a cylinder) offer the sort of performance/mpg jump last seen in the late 70s and early 80s when fuel injection appeared on mass market cars. Instead of 2+ litres and sub 30 mpg the 1.6 'GTI' engines offered more power and 40+mpg.

Is the standard Ford warranty 3yrs and unlimited mileage? I thought it was 60K miles? The 3 years warranty is BS, interior is 1yr, leaks (raining in) is not 3 years. Sure if it started to rust there'd be a get-out-clause for them etc etc. I have a 1.6TDCI 4 years and 63K miles and starting to get worried, one of the reasons for going with Ford was the thought that I'd never have to pay to change the rubber band.

Managed to have two weeks off work and bought this months "What Car" (February?, the publishing industry seem to operate in an alternative time continuum) to pass the time. There is an article on MOT fails. It lists the top 50 fails on the 1st MOT at 3 years. The Fester comes out mid table, however the really interesting thing is that its lists the type of fail and the Fester is 13.8% for wheels. The vast majority of others are less than 1%, for example the equivalent Vauxhall (Corsa) is 0.50%, 27 times less. Having a quick scan through I can only see a few other cars with more than 1-2% fail for wheels and all those well under 10%, Mini 5.5%, Clio, 4.9%, C1 5.41% for examples. So pretty conclusive proof there is a big problem with Fester wheels. The other striking thing is that almost without fail (pun intended), 30-40% of the failures are for tyres. Even though they are easy to check (you look at them every time you get in your car) and there are high police penalties if caught with bald tyres, more than a 1/3 of the cars on the road are dangerous.....

Mrs's Audi has stop start and a dual clutch s-tronic gearbox. (can't remember what Ford call their version). Stop start is bordering on dangerous when traffic is busy but not chocker. Every junction/roundabout you roll up to it cuts out just has you are trying merge into moving traffic. The stop starts takes a fraction of a second to fire up the engine, then the computer controlled gearbox takes a fraction of a second to decide to set off. In that time the approaching car is almost on top of you and so you to give it some welly, totally negating any saving in fuel when the engine cut out for 2 or 3 seconds. I can see in a large city nose to nose rush hour crawl it will prob save fuel. When no traffic is about and you never stop it won't come into operation. At all other times it just a frustration. Mrs has it turned off most of the time.

So bought and fitted resistor wires back in March/April........and drivers side bulb just gone...again. Being summer with light mornings and nights chuffin lights not even been on that much. Amazing how little niggles can really put you off and start to hate the fing car.

Not sure about other Mks but see below for MK7 Fester headlight blown bulb problems; http://www.fordownersclub.com/forums/topic/40802-good-bulbs/page-3 http://www.fordownersclub.com/forums/topic/8753-headlight-bulbs-blowing-on-mk7-fiesta/